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Film Review: ‘Minari’: Korean Immigrants Succeed in America by Enduring Like Water Celery
“Minari” did for the 2021 Academy Awards what the pop song “Gangnam Style” did for music in 2012; it gave notice to America that Korea can come over here and throw down an artistic gauntlet on our own turf. Not only can Korea play in our movie and music playgrounds, but it can also score big in this case a best supporting actress Oscar.
Coming to America, Korean Version
It’s the 1980s. Jacob Yi (Steven Yeun), his wife, Monica (Yeri Han), and their son David (Alan Kim) and daughter Anne (Noel Kate Cho) arrive from California to put down roots in the Arkansas outback.
From left, Steven Yeun, Alan S. Kim, Yuh-Jung Youn, Yeri Han and Noel Cho in Minari (Courtesy of A24/Josh Ethan Johnson)
Should a movie set entirely in rural Arkansas, directed by an American director and filmed in the United States count as a foreign movie or an American one? When Minari, a semiautobiographical film directed by Lee Isaac Chung, won the Golden Globes best foreign language film in February 2021 because the majority of the movie s dialogue is in Korean, the practice of categorizing non-English languages as foreign was once again contested.
Questions about Asian American identity and its seemingly perpetual otherness haunt the public imagination in a year where anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States have risen nearly 150%.
The Martha s Vineyard Times
Asian American life on an Arkansas farm
“Minari,” a warmhearted, semiautobiographical film about an Asian American family, is playing at the M.V. Film Center. Directed by Lee Isaac Chung and set in the 1980s, it narrates the story of the Yi family, who move to Arkansas to start a farm. The film takes its name from the Korean plant that is equivalent to Japanese parsley or Chinese celery. It’s a hardy vegetable that thrives in many places.
Jacob Yi is played by Steve Yeun, who was profiled recently in the NY Times Magazine. As Jacob, he settles his wife Monica (Yeri Han), son David (Alan Kim), and daughter Anne (Noel Kate Cho) in a secondhand trailer on 50 acres of Arkansas farmland. Monica, who liked her former life in California, is not too happy about relocating to the middle of the country, even though land there is a lot cheaper. The film is filled with the kind of appealing and sometimes funny details that make up the Yis’ life
For a refreshing change, the Korean immigrants who embody
Minari are not fresh off the boat; unable to find the financial stability needed to make it in 1980s California, the family moves to the Ozarks to start anew. But the originality stops there, and in its wake, we begin charting an all-too familiar course. The kids are cloyingly precocious. “I’m not pretty, I’m good-looking,” young David (Alan Kim) shouts while trying to dead-end whatever inroads antagonistic cupcake Grandma Soonja (Yuh-jung Youn) is attempting. If writer-director-ageist Lee Isaac Chung depicted Korean immigrants in half the sentimentally condescending manner as he does Soonja, festival audiences would have cancelled the picture halfway through the third reel. Treated like an escapee from an inter-galatic nursing home, the adorably demented oldster teaches the children to gamble and curse. She’s a firm believer that Mountain Dew is water sourced from naturally occurring springs, and just wait until y